Well, I've always joked that it was channeled to me. [Be]cause it was very easy. But it was after talking, just talking with people. That's what people told me. So I wrote it down. You know, I organized, wrote it down. It was really given to me by the people. And that's why I've always said it's for anybody's public use. It's not mine. I don't own that. So, there's no great story behind it, other than this is what people were sharing with me, with their stories when I go to mixed family groups, or conferences, or just talking with people individually. It all came out of that. I didn't make a single piece of that up myself.

The very first title from Agora, the new Polis Books imprint dedicated to crime fiction from diverse and underrepresented voices. Available in hardcover and ebook September 10, 2019.

A compelling and timely debut novel from an assured new voice: Three-Fifths is about a biracial black man, passing for white, who is forced to confront the lies of his past while facing the truth of his present when his best friend, just released from prison, involves him in a hate crime.

Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father heâ€™s never known, and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didnâ€™t, twenty-two-year-old Bobby Saraceno is passing for white. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden his truth from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a hardened racist. Bobbyâ€™s disparate worlds collide when his and Aaronâ€™s reunion is interrupted by a confrontation where Bobby witnesses Aaron assault a young black man with a brick. Fearing for his safety and his freedom, Bobby must keep his secret from Aaron and conceal his unwitting involvement in the hate crime from the police. But Bobbyâ€™s delicate house of cards crumbles when his father enters his life after more than twenty years.

Three-Fifths is a story of secrets, identity, violence and obsession with a tragic conclusion that leave all involved questioning the measure of a man, and was inspired by the authorâ€™s own struggles with identity as a biracial man during his time as a student in Pittsburgh amidst the simmering racial tension produced by the L.A. Riots and the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-nineties.

Of all the racist things people do, living out white privilege might be the most insidious. White privilege is not just the assumptions that get white people treated better by employers and loan officers. Itâ€™s also the mental architecture that permits white people to avoid thinking of themselves as â€śwhiteâ€ť â€” even as whiteness is assumed as the norm, and everyone who lacks it as â€śother.â€ť White privilege is most potent when it goes unconsidered.

It will be nearly impossible to avoid considering white privilege after reading â€śWhen I Was White: A Memoir.â€ť Author Sarah Valentine is that rare person who has lived both with white privilege and without it, and her account is moving and analytically rigorous.

Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who â€śpassedâ€ť as white, from famed critic Anatole Broyard to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte. Ms. Valentineâ€™s story is something else again. She was born in 1977, and grew up mostly in the North Hills, one of three children in a tightly knit Catholic family. Her parents were white, and so, therefore, was she â€” until she learned, at age 27, that her biological father, whom she never knew, was African American…